Ambitious But Rubbish

After his high-flying incident in Valencia Mark Webber dominated the field at Silverstone and moved ahead with his third win of the season (and fifth career win). He cleverly slipped past teammate Vettel at the race start and never looked back, although Hamilton gave him a serious fight for quite a bit of the race, but stayed in second place, followed by Rosberg — a third trip to the podium this year for the German.

Vettel did quite well to finish in 7th after a first-lap puncture put him in last place. Button has to be pleased with fourth  after qualifying horribly into 14th. He had an uncharacteristically good start, moving up 6 places to 8th in the first lap.

Kubica was in 3rd place for a while, but it has to be said that he was building up quite a train behind him; his Renault really struggled for pace. Relatedly, Alonso really did have a very unlucky day today after running wide while overtaking Kubica. Because the applicable rule was treated pretty strictly, it was judged that the Spaniard had obtained an advantage by cutting a chicane, and so the penalty in these cases is to hand back to the position to the overtakee. Except that by the time this was decided by the stewards Kubica had already retired with a hydraulic problem, so the penalty was changed to a drive-through. To compound things some more by the time the final penalty was communicated to Alonso the safety car was coming out; this would flatten traffic on the track and also prevent him from serving the penalty until the safety car was back in the pits,  which ultimately meant that by serving the penalty Alonso would end up behind everyone who was on the same lap.

It’s not because I like the guy (I don’t), but Alonso has been hard done by in that instance. This was a very poor call by the officials; there shouldn’t have been a penalty in the first place. It’s clear that Kubica was moving to block him and effectively forced him to cut the chicane to avoid a collision, so the problematic move really wasn’t taken intentionally, or “with malice aforethought”, and with Kubica having already retired I really don’t understand why the stewards made the decision they made, and which relegated Alonso to 14th place.

Both Williams managed to get into the points, with Rubens finishing 5th and Hulkenberg 10th. This has to be good news for Cosworth. 6th place went to the increasingly impressive Kamui Kobayashi. Adrian Sutil finished in 8th in front of Schumacher, and his teammate Liuzzi finished just outside the points.

That being said, what will be talked about in the next few days is the ongoing team problems at Red Bull. Webber is miffed at what (at least) seems to be preferential treatment of Vettel within the team.  I must say, I’m not entirely surprised to see that this issue hasn’t gone away…